Broadening Horizons is a series of international conferences dedicated to students and early-stage researchers, studying the Ancient Near East from the prehistoric period to the Islamic era. The conference intends to promote the exchange of scientific information between scholars of different disciplines, including archaeological, anthropological, historical, philological and cultural heritage studies, as well as related interdisciplinary fields.

Broadening Horizons has organized conferences for over a decade and the five previous ones were held in Ghent 2006, Lyon 2007, Barcelona 2010, Turin 2011, and in Udine 2017, pursuing the same interdisciplinary approach as the current one.

The 6^th Conference of Broadening Horizons will take place at the Freie Universität in Berlin from the 24^th to the 28^th of June 2019, hosted by the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies. The long-standing working partnership between the two institutes provides the inspiration for the general topic of the conference, which aims to further the collaboration between different disciplines engaged with the study of the Ancient Near East and to bridge the gap between written sources and archaeological evidence.

The framework of the conference provides an important opportunity for students and scholars in the early stages of their careers to present their own research or to attend papers presented by both their peers and more experienced colleagues. The international environment of the Freie Universität serves as an ideal forum for such an event, through which students and researchers from the host institutes can engage with other colleagues from many other universities and countries. Given its international spirit, the official language of the conference will be English.